Those of you who have been using VUDU to watch movies may have received a rather scary email recently. No, the company didn’t get hacked. Instead, what happened was a physical break-in to their offices. Whoever did it walked away with multiple hard drives that contained important data such as customer names, encrypted passwords, addresses, and phone numbers. In other words, the hard drives had some of the personal information that most people would not want a random stranger to get a hold of.

VUDU says that the passwords that were on the hard drives were encrypted, so there’s that. The company also says that there were no full credit card numbers on the hard drives that were stolen. Even so, VUDU has reset customer’s passwords. They posted a blog about the situation that says:

There was a break-in at the VUDU offices on March 24, 2013, and a number of items were stolen, including hard drives. Our investigation thus far indicates that these hard drives contained customer information, including names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, account activity, dates of birth, and the last four digits of some credit card numbers. It’s important to note that the drives did NOT contain full credit card numbers, as we do not store that information. If you have never set a password on the VUDU site and have only logged in through another site, your password was not on the hard drives. While stolen drives included VUDU account passwords, those passwords were encrypted. We believe it would be difficult to break the password encryption, but we can’t rule out that possibility given the circumstances of this theft. Therefore, we have reset all customer passwords.

March 24, 2013 was…. let’s see… 18 days ago! That’s a really long time to wait before letting customers know that their personal information may, potentially, be in the hands of whomever broke into the VUDU offices and stole the hard drives! Their blog goes on to say:

We are still in the process of sending email messages.

This means that there could very well be some VUDU customers who have not yet been informed about the break-in. That’s rather shocking! Typically, the sooner a company lets customer’s know that their data may be in the hands of thieves, the better. I feel bad for the people who are going to read a blog about the break-in before VUDU contacts them about it. Why did they wait so long? Again, their blog has an answer:

We notified law enforcement immediately when the break-in was discovered, and have worked closely with them on the investigation. We have also worked to reconstruct the information that was included on the drives to ensure we had an accurate assessment.

Perhaps the company is aware of the potential damage customers may face due to the break-in and the length of time VUDU waited before letting people know about it. They have made arrangements for customers to be automatically eligible to receive identity protection services from AllClear ID. You can find out more about the AllClear service, what it provides, and how to enroll on VUDU’s blog. It doesn’t mention if the service is free or if there will be a charge for using it (only that customers are “eligible”).

Thank you for your amazing support of the show. At 695 Episodes they are as exciting for me to do as the day I recorded the first one. Do you have a prize you would like to donate for show #700. Several companies have already stepped up and we are going to have a huge giveaway pool of gadgets and gear.. Speaking of Gear make sure you check out the latest episodes of The Gadget Professor and Robot Underpants!

For those of you that actually read the show notes and I know 10’s of thousands do not the clue on the Apple Product announcement is in the show notes.. You want to talk about a product that the koolaid drinkers will get excited about. Action packed show, of course I had to have a mini soap box time over recent App Store announcements. Hope you enjoy the show. Action hotline is available 24/7 at +1-619-342-7365 leave your comments there or drop me an e-mail.

The following Sponsors keep GNC running your support of them is greatly appreciated!
GoDaddy services saves you lot’s of money, check out my Promo Codes Today.
Sponsor: Get your 14 day Free Trial of Audible Gold to start Listening

D-Link and Boxee have announced that the Boxee Box will now support Vudu and NetFlix.

This will bring even more choices to the Boxee box and let it’s users have access to the 1000’s of movies and TV shows available on NetFlix via their subscription service. NetFlix subscriptions start at $7.99 for streaming only and $8.99 for 1 DVD by mail at a time in addition to the streaming. Go to NetFlix.com to check out their service.

Vudu brings HD movies, on demand for rental. They have first run movies that are available on the Vudu service the same day the DVD’s are released. Standard rentals are priced at $2 for 2 nights and HD New Releases rent for $4.99. Check out vudu.com for more information.

The D-Link Boxee box can be ordered for around $200 just about everywhere electronics are sold. The Boxee service also includes a plethora of other streaming content from various media creators around the internet (including Tech Podcast Network and Blubrry channels)

The Boxee Box itself features an SD card slot, two USB ports, optical digital audio, HDMI output, 802.11n wireless, and an Ethernet port. It has a double-sided remote featuring a built-in QWERTY keyboard and simple browsing interface, consumers can kick back and watch virtually anything. It also integrates social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, Right from your remote!

For more information on the Boxee service, check them out over at boxee.tv and check out the boxee box by D-Link at dlink.com/boxee

Jeffrey and Tom interview Vamshi Sriperumbudur to see what Dyyno has to offer video broadcasters. Dyyno are a video streaming company and offer a complete portfolio of tools for the video lifecycle, from video creation through delivery to promotion and marketing. In this video, the focus is on the initial capture and broadcast of the video stream.

The first part is “dUb”, Dyyno Universal Broadcaster, which allows the broadcaster to broadcast nearly anything. Basically, if you can see it on your computer screen, then you can broadcast it, whether it’s a full-screen game or an application such as Powerpoint.

To make this more useful to video broadcasters, dUb has been integrated with the Geniatech range of video capture devices; EZ Grabber, EZ Grabber 2.0 and HD Cap Express. Over a million of these have been sold which makes them some of the more widely used video capture devices.

The basic package of EZ Grabber and dUb costs just $30 to get started with 50 hours per month and upgrade packages for more hours are available.

The competition to win an EZ Grabber in this video is already finished, we gave the units away during the live coverage.

I want to wish all of the Ohana a Merry Christmas and of course a safe and Happy Holidays. As a family we are dealing with several things that are really making us reflect, thankfully my daughter is here for the holidays and it has been entirely to long since she has spent any time with us. I hope as you spend time with your Ohana that you cherish each moment with them. I will have a regular show on Monday and a slightly abbreviated show next Thursday.

The following Sponsors support GNC your support of them is appreciated!
GoDaddy services saves you money, check out my Promo Codes Today.

I have had a very productive trip here in Albuquerque but I am more than ready to head home. Lots of work to do in the studio and not a lot of time to do it. PLus my honey do list is a mile long. I expect to do a Saturday Morning Tech Show if the Studio is ready. Sunday we announce the Slate for 2010 Podcast Awards so it has to be ready. Have a great Thanks Giving and be Safe.

The following Sponsors support GNC your support of them is appreciated!
GoDaddy services saves you money, check out my Promo Codes Today.
Visit gotomeeting.com, click the try it free button & use promo code: Podcast.

Switched the primary recording off of Firewire to Analog to see if that was what was causing recording issue and the recording machine acted up again. Very happy to have a backup of tonights show for you to download. We are having trouble with the iTunes update at this time..

Mitsubishi is putting Vudu into it’s LED based TV sets. This is one step closer to having a full blown computer built into every television set. What is really exciting about this is that Vudu brings not only movies not available via your cable provider to owners of Mitsubishi sets but also alternative content just like Geek News Central. This was one of the more exciting announcements from CES.

New Studio lights are installed and it makes a big difference to the video quality. Baby Steps but this was like learning to walk. Story on the show.. Big huge thank you to Pat over at LitePanels.com and his expertise in the placement of the LED LitePanels. Lots of tech to chat about tonight as always and for those of you Comcast subscribers you will want to tune in for sure.